History on the rack

Everyone finally gets their defenders, and in the Daily Telegraph Andrew Roberts seemeed rather thrilled by Nicholas Farrell's "full-scale revisionist biography praising Benito Mussolini". Farrell's Mussolini "is pretty much unrecognisable to those of us who have been brought up on the biographies by the liberal British historians Denis Mack Smith and Jasper Ridley," said Roberts.

He did take issue with some of Farrell's assertions, for example that Mussolini's declaration of war against the Allies "might well have been a brilliant decision"; that he "saved more Jews than Oskar Schindler" ("Mussolini's anti-semitism was not biological racism but spiritual racism", apparently); and that he "was a master political tactician". But Roberts thought Farrell's argument that "[Mussolini] and fascism... got things done" was "passionate and thought-provoking". Mussolini: A New Life was, he decided, a "highly spirited, opinionated and rather remarkable book".

Roberts then reappeared in the Evening Standard, reviewing The Stasi Files: East Germany's Secret Operations Against Britain by Anthony Glees, and Stasiland by Anna Funder. He decried the "weird, horrifying, viciously cruel place that was cold war east Germany" and was amazed both by the amount of evidence - extant files would, "placed end-to-end... stretch for 112 miles" - and by the size of Stasi operations: "Whereas Hitler's Gestapo made do with 13,500 officers, the Stasi had no fewer than two million people on its books."

The Stasi was, according to Glees, assiduous in its attempts to infiltrate British elites (defence expert John Roper, now Lib-Dem chief whip in the Lords, is alleged by Glees to be a collaborator, which Roper strongly denies), but, according to Funder, also prone to the truly absurd, "keeping the underpants of tens of thousands of GDR citizens in carefully labelled jars... including those of the entire political opposition of Saxony".

And the Sunday Times's Kevin Jackson thoroughly enjoyed Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. "Almost everyone knows corpses are routinely dissected by medical students... far fewer are aware that corpses are also shot with bullets at close range by ballistics experts, subjected to serious trauma by car manufacturers, decapitated by cosmetic surgeons... or frozen, shattered and transformed into fertiliser by Swedish ecologists". Roach's book "is not merely instructive but surprisingly delightful".